INDIANAPOLIS (Legal Newsline) - Saying they were participating in “a process of incremental change,” a majority of justices on the Indiana Supreme Court loosened the rules for lawsuits over emotional distress to allow a mother to sue over the effects of learning her daughter had been sexually abused years before.
The decision drew a dissent from two justices, who said the question of whether to compensate people who haven’t been directly injured by a defendant should be left to legislators instead of the courts.
Melody Ruch sued the New Augusta North Public Academy and others after she learned her profoundly disabled daughter had been sexually abused by a worker who was changing the teenager’s diapers sometime in 2015 or early 206. The worker admitted to the abuse and was sentenced to prison for it and Ruch sued in 2019, claiming she was emotionally distraught by the discovery and “not really functioning” as her normal self.
A trial court dismissed the lawsuit, including a claim for economic damages because Ruch was unable to care for her daughter at home and forced to place her in a chronic-care facility. The trial court cited longstanding Indiana law limiting so-called “bystander damages” for emotional distress to people who actually witnessed the injury or death of a loved one.
An appeals court reinstated the economic damages claim but refused to extend Indiana common law to allow the emotional distress claim. The Indiana Supreme Court, in a Dec. 22 decision by Justice Christopher Goff, reinstated the entire case.
Acknowledging the court had to make a fundamental change to the law, the judge wrote that “the extraordinary circumstances here warrant a proper remedy.” The case, he wrote, requires the court to decide “whether a narrow expansion of our common law is required to do justice and to meet the reasonable expectations of the millions of Hoosiers governed by our legal system.”
“We conclude that it is,” he said in the opinion, joined by Chief Justice Loretta Rush and Justice Steven David.
The majority cited similar rulings by courts in Alaska, Louisiana and Hawaii, although it noted a Massachusetts decision rejecting a mother’s lawsuit when she didn’t learn of a child’s abuse until months later.
For more than a century, the judge wrote, Indiana limited lawsuits over emotional distress to people who either suffered some physical impact by the defendant themselves or witnessed a loved one being injured or killed. The Indiana Supreme Court started with a strict rule in an 1897 decision rejecting a lawsuit by a woman who sued the railroad after a watchman lowered a crossing gate on her horse, causing it to gallop away with her carriage being towed behind. The court concluded that “mental suffering alone, not accompanied by any physical injury, cannot be the foundation for the recovery of damages.”
The Indiana Supreme Court loosened the rule with two decisions in 1991, scrapping the requirement for a physical injury – although some sort of impact was still necessary -- and extending it to accident victims traumatized by witnessing the death of another person. The old policy reasons for limiting emotional damages claims, including preventing fraudulent claims and frivolous litigation, were “no longer valid,” the court ruled.
The court loosened the bystander-injury rule further in 2000, eliminating the requirement for plaintiffs to have suffered any impact at all, in the case of an 8-year-old who witnessed her younger brother’s body rolling off the highway after he was struck by a car. Under the new rules, lawsuits were allowed if someone observed the serious injury or death of a close family member or its “gruesome aftermath.”
That immediately raised the question of how much time could elapse between the accident and the plaintiff witnessing its aftermath. The Indiana Supreme Court established a new rule in Clifton v. McCammack, a 2015 decision rejecting a father’s lawsuit over viewing his son’s covered body after it had been removed from a fatal car wreck. The court said any further expansion in bystander injuries “would be too likely to raise the amalgam of policy problems we seek to avoid.”
“At the end of the day, we acknowledge that most states have refrained from disposing of a proximity requirement.,” the majority concluded. “But, while Indiana often assumes a `cautiously progressive’ approach to its law, `more than once the state has taken a road less traveled,’” citing a historical article.
In dissent, Justice Geoffrey Slaughter cited the old maxim, “hard cases make bad law.”
The mother did not observe her daughter’s sexual abuse or even learn of it until years later,” forcing the court to come up with a new rule, the judge wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Mark Massa, forcing the court to come up with a new rule. That leads to unequal results, he continued, since a mother can recover damages for discovering her child’s sexual abuse long after it occurred, but a father can’t recover for witnessing the aftermath of his son’s fatal car accident.
The bigger question is why draw the line here, the judge asked.
“If the Court is right that today’s rule reflects `the reasonable expectations of the millions of Hoosiers governed by our legal system’ then their elected representatives in our legislature should be the ones to say so,” he wrote.